


just run for the hills

by lackingsoy



Category: Code Geass
Genre: 2mo helltrip, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, First Love, Foreshadowing, Lelouch Being a Cryptic Piece of Ass and Suzaku Cutting Through the Bullshit like Butter, Lelouch makes Suzaku cry, M/M, Road Trips, Suzaku cries in this one, Yearning, Zero Requiem, i hate these kids, time-skip take!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25654663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: It was very different from piloting a Knightmare, Suzaku decided. In Lancelot, he was encased in some six tons of metal--huge and protected, with at least a half of meter of armor between him and his surroundings at all times. Terrain didn't matter so long as there was something to get by on.CC narrowly avoided a ditch in the street's middle, and Suzaku briefly imagined Lelouch and he catapulting from the vehicle.
Relationships: C.C. & Kururugi Suzaku & Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia, Kururugi Suzaku/Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia
Comments: 9
Kudos: 77





	just run for the hills

**Author's Note:**

> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4f25VHcHoWg9354V3rTWkm?si=5e1eIqbNQV2TQJmfFADkLw)

None of them wore a helmet.

Well--there was one, but Lelouch took it and frowned at its insides and tossed it to CC, who promptly tossed it at Suzaku. It stank of sweat and the victim's--milling about right behind them, Geassed into obliviousness--cologne. 

"Rather generic, don’t you think."

Lelouch had passed a hand over his face so only his left eye showed. Suzaku set the helmet down with numb fingers and battered back the feeling of nausea. 

"It's fine," he said, and Lelouch hummed, dropping the hand. His hair was longer now, bangs almost always obscuring his eyebrows and eyes, the fringes of it clinging to his nape. Curled there like little thumbs. He swept them away with a finger. 

"Wear it, then. Where we're going, you're going to need it."

Suzaku stared at him, then looked around for CC. She had disappeared into the garage. Suzaku looked back at Lelouch. “I can duck and roll if it comes down to it. You should wear it.”

Lelouch made a disgusted sound. “I’m not putting that thing on.”

Suzaku wanted to tell him that he’d worn a helmet-esque mask for hours straight without being particularly bothered. Suzaku wanted to say that he’d been caught in worse situations and he’d always gotten away unscathed. (Until last year. Until Suzaku.)

But that was Zero. Lelouch wasn’t nearly as impervious or unbreakable. Suzaku saw the skin left uncovered by his long-sleeved shirt and despite the shade could picture the sure stroke of red there, burned by exposure to the sun. 

“Where we’re going, you’re going to need it,” Suzaku parroted back to him, in part for argument’s sake, but mostly because there was something about the way Lelouch was right now, loose and sweaty and probably sunburned, that made Suzaku want to protect him. 

Lelouch raised an eyebrow at him, apparently amused by the idea. 

“I won’t, actually.” He said, with the same glint in his eyes that he got whenever he heard news of the empty throne. Hot and flint-like. His face turned so that the shadow of the day moved across his cheekbone and caught on his jawline as he stared out into the shimmering waves of heat. “Not anymore.” 

Oh. That was as close to an admission--and confirmation--that Suzaku was going to get. Flaunting Zero was no longer an option. Zero had presumably vanished at Kamino Island, and it was going to stay that way. 

Lelouch turned back, watching Suzaku with narrowed eyes, and Suzaku’s throat dried at what he might say next--because it was there, at the forefront at whatever this was going to have to be, whatever they’d have to do. But Lelouch just looked at him, picking out what he saw, and what he saw in Suzaku’s face must make him turn away, lips curling, to haul one of their backpacks onto one gangly shoulder.

“Who knows. Guess we’ll have to leave some things to God.” He held out the other remaining backpack to Suzaku and slid a bland smile between them like a weathered plank, staying his hand. Suzaku took the bag. Their conversation was clearly over.

A roar of aged engine and the stinging smell of gasoline and: “There is no God and I’m not going to drive us into the ocean, if you must know. Though that could be interesting.”

The rickety, two-wheeled piece of machinery with a plastic slab for a windshield slid to a stop next to them. Lelouch pinched his nose shut, squinting at the motorbike. "Very reassuring, witch. There wasn’t a sidecar?" 

CC shrugged, one foot on the ground to keep the entire thing upright. Her hair was tied back, arms red and bare and probably on the edge of sunburn, pants rolled up past her knees. "So sorry my chauffeur-ship hasn’t been satisfying thus far. Two can make the journey if you don’t want to.”

“Ha, ha.” Lelouch deadpanned. CC rolled her eyes.

“No, there isn’t a sidecar. Three can pack on fine--what was it? Sardine-style." 

"Not the metaphor," Lelouch muttered, and CC ignored him and looked sideways at Suzaku. "You're in the middle."

"Uh." Suzaku looked behind her, the leather stretch of a seat peeling and almost definitely too short for two additional behinds. "Wouldn't it be better for Lelouch to? Since he’s thinner."

"His fawn legs would make a terrible brace. Unless you'd like to buck off the bike at any given red light?"

He didn't, so he slid in behind CC without further argument and Lelouch got on after him, the bike lurching side to side with their combined weight. Suzaku had to plant his feet firmly on the ground to keep them from toppling over entirely, leaning forward so that Lelouch could cram most of himself in. More than once, Lelouch’s legs brushed Suzaku’s. CC waited for them to get settled with a patience Suzaku couldn’t imagine having. But maybe that was a mere side effect of being alive for a millenia. 

“This is stupid,” Lelouch hissed, pressed up against Suzaku like a baby koala. His long legs dangled awkwardly off the motorbike’s sides.

CC threw him an unsympathetic look and stuck the key into the ignition. “It was _your_ idea, prince.” Glued skin-to-skin in California's dry summer heat on a beaten-up motorbike, overloaded by two, with a long stretch of interstate to cover. 

A road trip for the times. 

"A necessary one,” was the response as CC cranked the handles once, twice, and Lelouch snaked his arms around Suzaku's chest, a backpack pressed uncomfortably between them. A mild sweat broke out on his hands as Suzaku reached across CC's midriff and held.

“Ready?” she said. 

“To be or not to be?" Lelouch hollered over the revving engine.

“Fuck off,” CC said, and they took off. The soles of Suzaku's shoes screeched over concrete before he thought to lift them. Dirt and chunks of rock and sand pelleted the exposed lines of his calves like little sun flares. 

It was very different from piloting a Knightmare, Suzaku decided. In Lancelot, he was encased in some six tons of metal--huge and protected, with at least a half of meter of armor between him and his surroundings at all times. Terrain didn't matter so long as there was something to get by on.

CC narrowly avoided a ditch in the street's middle, and Suzaku briefly imagined Lelouch and he catapulting from the vehicle. 

And none of them were wearing helmets.

They were exposed in the same way they were every day in the past month and then some, pinned under an uncaring sun and the weight of their incoming legacy. Their acceleration shook through the bike’s engine and that effort rattled Suzaku’s teeth, whipped CC's hair past his cheek. The sun beat down on them and cooked the metal against their thighs with steady insistence. So much so the wind felt nice on the backs of their knees.

Lelouch's fingers clenched his sides and Suzaku thought that it was hot breath glancing off the nape of his neck. Little bits of asphalt flew at their legs, collided with the metal parts of the bike like a miniature barrage of projectiles. 

They were exposed on all sides.

But in a weird, volatile way that made him feel slightly more alive.

The light ahead flashed yellow. CC gunned it.

They darted through the intersection--wheels lifting over the steep dip as intersection melded into street. For a split second they were airborne, vehicle and hanging limbs and all.

Lelouch shouted something incoherent, hands grabbing wildly at Suzaku’s shirt. CC laughed over the engine. They made solid ground again, shaking with the sudden force of it, and kept going. Suzaku threw a look back: no cars behind them, all clogged up at the light they’d hapfully ignored. 

What must they look like, he wondered: a smear of red and dirty clothes and bright hair? If they got pulled over, then the reason would certainly be something like reckless driving; a couple of stupid kids out joyriding. (Toting around a presumably dead Britannian prince and an immortal and a traitor to the Rounds. But that wouldn't be immediately apparent.)

They would just be a couple of eighteen somethings. 

Strange, that idea. To not be anything other than a boy whose most terrible crime is to be on a vehicle going twenty miles over the posted speed limit. Suzaku turned the thought over in his head, musing at it, when another, smaller voice of one said: _you are very, very young._

“If we get pulled over, I’m gonna say I don't know you people,” Suzaku said.

“Bit late for that,” as she stepped on the gas. 

“Having regrets already?” Lelouch's hands didn’t loosen from its vice grip on Suzaku’s chest. 

_No,_ Suzaku thought, and the thought surprised him so much his mouth parted and his teeth ached the second his mouth opened to the wind.

“I will if we keep going over the speed limit,” he said instead.

At this, Lelouch’s lips twitched and his eyes crinkled, did a thing with the afternoon light and-- _that_ shut Suzaku up. Even as Lelouch said, “That’s not going to happen,” and let out a mock sigh as CC affirmed her position on the matter. Suzaku just faced forward again and focused on the sensation of the sun itching over his skin, on the sweaty parts of his shirt that stuck to him.

Not the parts that Lelouch held. Or touched. Or wouldn’t let go of. 

Dark asphalt climbed in and out the sky as California sloped and they crawled up highs and lows. Windows and polished paint threw back light. Lelouch's black shoes shone. CC's elbows flashed as she changed lanes. Suzaku’s hair flattened over his skull when he poked his head out from behind the windshield. The wind combed across his forehead, the pressure of it forcing him to close his eyes.

Lelouch’s voice was muffled near his ear. Suzaku turned his head to hear him better. “What?”

“Something’s wrong,” Lelouch’s eyes a shiny blur in his peripheral, hair a murky blaze about his head.

Then the engine curdled and spat. A series of unnatural-sounding noises hissed out from the wheels, and the motorcycle began to screech, careening bodily to the left then right, rattling all three of them. 

Alarm was sharp and steady in his mind. “Get off the road,” Suzaku said, arms tightening around CC’s waist.

“I know.” CC pulled towards the edge of the lane. Cars swerved out of their way; they stuttered along the shoulder, eventually slowing down. Suzaku stretched his legs out, the back of his shoes grinding into the asphalt as CC guided the puttering thing to a stop. The bike gave one final heave before exhaust fumes filled the air. She waited a second before trying to start it again, turning the key in the ignition. The bike's engine gave only a minuscule whimper. 

“Well then.” She hit a fist against the speedometer. It rattled through the front of the bike and did nothing.

“That’s one regret,” Suzaku said. 

Lelouch was the first to get off. He circled to the bike’s front, hunching down, before flicking his eyes up at them.

“That was anticlimactic,” he said.

  
  
  
  


They decided to walk the rest of the way after trying to hitchhike twice. One hitchhiker was probably acceptable--but three? Three was too many.

Nobody stopped for them, and Lelouch couldn’t command anybody to, not at 70 miles per hour.

So they walked.

Lelouch had their only map unfurled in his hands, trailing behind CC as he puzzled over their location. 

“Oh,” he said, just loud enough for Suzaku to hear. “There’s a beach nearby.”

“It’s California,” CC said. “Of course there is.”

Suzaku shouldered the two backpacks--Lelouch had dumped his onto him earlier, saying something about the weight being a distraction--and thought about summer water and sea salt and childish glee. 

He doesn't know what possessed him to say, "Let's go."

CC made a sound a bit like surprise. Lelouch just looked up from the map and eyed Suzaku with something oddly familiar in contexts years past.

"Alright," he said, and pointed eastward.

They picked their way over stretches of land until asphalt melded fully into grainy dirt and softly burnt sand. They saw pearly rocks and their blistering, shining ridges and heard blinks of seagulls screeching high above them. The wind parched their eyes and made them taste salt whenever their mouths opened.

The ocean came to them a mile inward: loud and crashing against the shores. The sun was still high enough to send sharp sparks of light across the shifting waters, the rolling waves.

CC stopped then and stood perfectly still, perched on a vantage point that was an eroding shell of white rock, knees red and hands raised to shield her eyes from the sun. She was looking at something far, far away. Looking for something, maybe.

Lelouch moved past her, slipping down the slow decline rock by rock, careful and meticulous in his descent. Suzaku had to be doubly careful with the two packs of luggage weighing on his back.

He eventually reached the end of the waterfall of jagged stone edges, at which a hand barred his vision as he stooped to catch his breath and watch the sand steep his shoes. 

Lelouch held a hand out to him, face idle and oddly expectant. Suzaku thought it was kind of funny for a creature such as he to offer such a gesture, knightly or romantic or otherwise. It seemed out of place. But then again, they were eighteen and war criminals and planning to carry out a coup d'etat in a month. (The world would never be ready for them.)

Suzaku was hardly a knight. Here and now, at the bottom of a rocky slope on a thin strip of nearly abandoned beach, he wasn't anything but young; he was nothing but an abominable boy by the name of Suzaku Kururugi.

He took Lelouch's hand.

Lelouch's wink of a smile must've been a trick of light. (But Suzaku couldn’t make up the warmth of Lelouch’s palm, soft against his callouses.)

They ended up side by side, facing the ocean, watching the water change shape and take in varying amounts of light. At some point, Suzaku shrugged off the backpacks and his jacket, tying it at his waist when CC trudged into view next to them, eyes misty with longing. Suzaku ached at the sight.

"Deja vu?" Lelouch asked, and his voice was so soft. 

CC looked beyond them, fixed upon the distant horizon. A haze of indiscernible colors--too fast for anyone to catch--swept through her eyes. The gold there seemed swallowed. "16th century," she gave, and fell silent. Suzaku wondered how deeply she remembered everything that has ever happened to her. If everything, if things, if things like this meshed together in an inconceivable misconception of a life too long lived. 

Lelouch snatched Suzaku's jacket from where it was hazardedly tied and used it as a makeshift blanket, spreading it against the grains and dirt and situating himself upon it, even kicking off his shoes, socks. Suzaku gave him a look and Lelouch let it tumble past him with easy indifference. Instead, he patted the space next to him--a shriveled up sleeve--in a gesture for Suzaku to join him.

CC sat herself down and leaned heavily into Lelouch’s side and seeing this, Suzaku gave and crouched to take a seat. Peeled his feet from the insides of his shoes. He didn’t dare prop himself against Lelouch. Didn’t even think to touch him.

It seemed dangerous, that. Doing that would be too close to admitting there was a line at all, being toed over and over. So Suzaku sat there, hunched over his drawn-up knees and staring out at the spread of sea, willing the wind to brush all remnants and reminders of Lelouch’s heat from the insides of his right hand, from the breadth of his side. 

If they were luckier than they were today, they'd reach the capital in half a month. Lelouch had told him enough of his plans--“ _Our_ plans,” Suzaku had interjected, and the surprise in Lelouch’s face almost surprised him, too--for Suzaku to know that the world would know when they arrived. Grandly: that was the way Lelouch handled his entrances, and--Suzaku figured, dully--that was going to be the way he handled his exit, too. 

Not that they talked about that. Suzaku didn’t think Lelouch knew that he knew what Lelouch was going to do. What Lelouch was going to have Suzaku do. 

How much do we have to give, Suzaku thought, turning his face to catch a glimpse of Lelouch’s, which the sun and the shadows of clouds played across: for the so-called Greater Good?

“Not everything.”

Lelouch’s voice forced Suzaku to blink rapidly. Did he say that out loud? Lelouch smiled, a kind of sharp hook dug into the edge of his lips, the deep purple of his eyes dark and knowing. 

“Not everything,” he repeated, slowly as if letting down Suzaku from a high place. “I won’t let that happen.”

The words shouldn’t be able to hurt him. Shouldn’t crawl into his guts and pound little fists there. Or trail bile into his throat.

“What?” Suzaku managed. Lelouch just watched him with that same irksome smile and shook his head, putting a finger to his lips while motioning to CC, who had fallen suspiciously quiet on his shoulder. Asleep, Suzaku realized. He tipped his head closer, courteous, and the line loomed larger. He barely managed to keep the tremor from his whisper: “What do you mean?” 

"You will give up some things. Ordinary things.” The purple of Lelouch's eyes fell away. When they opened again, it wasn’t pity scattered there like smashed flints. Wasn’t sadness, either. “An ordinary life.” 

Suzaku’s throat closed. He thought, arbitrarily, of Euphemia.

“That’s fine,” he heard himself say. He couldn’t tell what was in his voice: resignation, disappointment, or cooled disillusionment. “I’m prepared for that.”

Lelouch stared at him, silent. Something hard flickered across his face, then shifted and flattened and solidified in what Suzaku recognized as resolve, heady and detrimental. “I’ve always wondered about this,” he murmured, and his gaze didn’t stray an inch, “But how long have you been prepared to lose so much and gain so little?” A slight of hand, a flex of movement in Suzaku’s peripheral. “Since when we were children?”

Suzaku didn’t answer, mostly because he knew Lelouch already knew, had already connected most of the dots. It wouldn't be long before Suzaku’s flaws and motivations and skewed loyalties firmed perfectly in his mind: an unlimited timeline of all his wrongdoings, soldier or knight or reaper or otherwise. 

Lelouch’s voice softened until the wind made to snatch it. "Since you killed your father?”

Ten years old, Japan on fire and threats to the closest things he had to friends and a family. That was what Suzaku chose to remember of that day, now, beyond the shape of a wooden hilt in his child’s hands and his father's blood steeped so far deep into the fabric of his body that nobody else could see it as clearly as he. 

“Probably,” Suzaku whispered, a croak of an answer so heavy-handed that it bowed his head, shut his eyes. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe.

A hand at Suzaku’s chin brought him back up. Suzaku opened his eyes to Lelouch’s dark ones, and what he saw there was unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

Not on Lelouch. Not with the light striking across his cheekbones and into his eyes as if to shuck off sparks. Suzaku did not see pity; only an aged understanding, the sort that contained within it the vestiges of pride and sorrow. It shined there in Lelouch’s eyes, and the sharpness to his lips had long changed into a thin fierce curl. 

“I promise you Japan.” He pushed it out into the air between them like it wouldn’t hang there forever, till the end of time. A promise. It was not unlike a condition, resting on their shoulders like added buoyancy or weight. Maybe even like Geass, the way it slipped into the bones and hitched itself to the marrow there.

A promise. “You can’t promise that,” Suzaku said, and his voice cracked.

He could hardly remember the last Tanabata festival. Or the smell of incense or the comforting rumble of temple goers or festive colors, red and pink and blue, shining across the sky's roof. Those wooden slips for wishes and booming firework displays and carefree screams of children as they streamed down open streets without fear of retribution.

The generation after him could hardly write a traditional kanji character. Elders couldn’t speak a sentence in Japanese out loud. Their alleyways and neighborhoods were filled with faint whispers, their language passed back and forth like wisps at the end of fingers and fireflies of reminders. They’d learned to weave through the narrow spaces with the care of a beetle on bark and the grace of a praying mantis between leaps.

One hard blow would take it all away, smear their spoken word into extinction. The final wick before the wax swallows them whole. 

Lelouch couldn’t promise Suzaku anything. Not with Japan’s fate, not so easily. Not with his eyes on Suzaku’s, not with his Britannian blood and Suzaku’s Japanese veins. 

“Since when did you care?” Suzaku whispered. Lelouch’s eyes flashed.

“I have never not,” Lelouch said, hard as if daring him to retort. “Not when it concerns you.”

And Nunnally, but the thought alone was enough to silence his mind, make his head go flatline-white. 

“Oh,” was all he could manage, numbly. 

Lelouch’s thumb brushed the skin of Suzaku’s chin, nail grazing his bottom lip before dropping away. Suzaku felt the imprint of his absence on him. “After I’m done with Britannia, all it’ll take is the right nudge.” Lelouch's eyes were dark, then.

Suzaku understood immediately. “You mean Nunnally.”

“Partially. I also mean you.”

A glimpse of Zero’s mask, abandoned, perched on top of high shoulders.

 _His_ shoulders.

Numbness or nausea or some sickening mix of both rose inside of him, stomach to chest to throat. Lelouch wore a crooked smile and gave a quiet, haggard laugh:

“Passing the torch. A rather tedious business.”

Suzaku wasn’t one for extreme irony. He also wasn't stupid. “You want me to be”--the thing that killed Euphemia, the thing that tried to save him, the thing that started this all, the thing that holds a world in its black, bloodied hands--“the one to kill you.”

Waves crashed and sank into the shores right by their bare toes. Lelouch didn’t look away, gaze fixed on Suzaku’s face, revealing nothing like surprise or regret. There was something foreign and strange and ruinous in there, Suzaku understood, in the same way the sun dies for a few select minutes every eighteen months. Desperation must’ve slipped into the recesses of his face, into his line of sight, because Lelouch smiled, gentle in a way he had no right to be. 

Don’t say it, Suzaku thought. 

“Yes,” he said, and Suzaku’s heart sank like a stone. His head swam with nausea. The strip of ocean next to them spat water at their feet. 

He was standing now, he realized, the distance between his head and his feet wide and bizarre, the vertigo of it making his vision spotty and his weight go slant with invisible burden. His toes curled into the sand and the hard ground it covered. 

“You couldn’t have expected me to agree,” he said.

CC was awake now, head turned up towards them, eyes glinting. Lelouch had a hand lifted towards him, as if to touch or reach him. Suzaku turned on him, feeling his fists clench and unclench, knuckles hard and white. “You couldn’t have expected me to say: _of course_. Are you--are you stupid?”

If Lelouch could look struck, if Lelouch vi Britannia could look at all remorseful, then the downturn of his lips and the minute narrowing of his eyes would be it. Suzaku could revel in his speechlessness for the rest of time, but Lelouch, predictably, broke his silence. 

“Don’t,” Lelouch said, his mouth curved apart as if to say more. Suzaku stared at him, feeling at a loss with the force of his anger, feeling stupid with it. CC didn’t say a thing, but the look she gave him was unperturbed. _Idiots_ , went unsaid.

 _Go,_ the gold said. 

Suzaku turned away.

Started towards the other end of the beach, sun licking across his arms in bare-boned heat. The soles of his feet ached. Then his legs picked up and he started to run. His feet cut across the sand and dirt until he couldn’t feel them anymore. He thought somebody called for him, but as he passed the ocean and its shimmering glow and swatches of faceless people, he couldn’t care less. He didn’t stop for anybody.

Lelouch, on his knees. Hands going cold, fingers long and lifeless. Eyes dark and hooded and unseeing. Flecks of dried blood patterned odd and uneven over his pale skin. Lelouch, Lelouch, Lelouch.

Dead. 

Suzaku stopped. Stooped, mouth opening and closing as nausea twisted his stomach and his chest like a fish out on land. An earthworm under high noon. “Fuck you,” muffled by the crook of his elbow. He gagged on nothing and was crying, probably, tasting not the salt of the seven seas but his own make-believe. Euphemia’s limp body flashed into mind. Suzaku bit into his shirt sleeve, and when he screamed it was strangled into an unnatural noise, keening. 

He stayed like that for a while--for a long time, actually, because when he finally lifted his head the sun was lower than it was and Lelouch’s shoes stood, shadowed and still, two feet away from him.

“Go away,” he said, automatic. 

A silence, then a breath that sounded like a sigh and the creaking of knees as Lelouch knelt into view. He looked like he usually did, straight-faced and sharp and beautiful, but with a tiredness, as if draped with bodies struck down by his Geass. 

“Here,” Lelouch said, and his voice was too quiet: too ready to be broken into. “I have your shoes.”

Suzaku still didn’t look up, but he held out a hand and felt the dirt of his tennis shoes crumble off his palm. Slowly, he stretched his sore legs and shoved his bare feet, scraped up and nicely numb, into them.

He didn’t look for Lelouch’s eyes which saw everything or saw enough because his face must be a bruise of dried tears and anger and sadness and Suzaku just--hated him. Despised him. 

Ached for him. 

“Thanks,” Suzaku said. He didn’t rise from the ground and chose instead to stare past Lelouch’s shoulder to fixate on the shimmering horizon. 

Lelouch didn’t, either. He sat some ways away from him, and said nothing. Eventually, though: “I made you cry.”

Suzaku didn’t respond. Just hunched over and waited. When it was clear Lelouch wouldn’t continue, he said: “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

When he looked back, Lelouch met him with near-tar eyes. “What would you like me to say?” He asked, calm and placid, and the anger in Suzaku’s chest sputtered. That you’re sorry, Suzaku thought. That you won’t ask me to murder you wearing the mask and garb of Euphie’s killer. 

“Don’t you ever regret anything that comes out of your mouth?” Suzaku said, low and slow so that he could rein in his emotions raging through his belly like a suddenly blind beast. Lelouch turned his head away, something like a scoff leaving his nose.

“I can’t,” he said, eventually. “Not about this.” Lelouch fixed his eyes back on Suzaku, looking unapologetic and resolved, the same stony glint in his gaze. “It has to be you, Suzaku.”

The noise clamoring about in his head died. Suzaku’s cesspool of hate-grief shuttered and vanished. All he could think of to say, then, in the inches of space between them and the water’s glare surrounding them, was: “Why?”

Lelouch didn’t smile. Didn’t do much of anything at all. His features were very still, and only the ocean’s waves crashing up on the shore behind him seemed to disturb the air around him. They faced each other like they were meant to be parts of the same whole.

“Because you deserve to. Because I deserve it.” Lelouch said.

This felt like losing, Suzaku thought. This felt like falling farther and farther away.

And it felt like duty. His duty, and how he ached at that understanding.

After what seemed like eternity, Suzaku whispered, “I hate you.”

A momentary pressure against his shoulders. Lelouch, leaning his raven head against the bone there, wind fanning the hair out of his closed eyes. Suzaku took a shuddering breath and fitted his own head very carefully against Lelouch’s, and felt a hitch of chest--his or Lelouch’s, he couldn’t tell. 

“I'm sorry,” was the whisper of the thing Suzaku always wanted to hear, but could no longer bear. It was small and raw, as if thoroughly ground between teeth.

“Don’t,” Suzaku said, and his hands climbed ridges of backbone and slopes of shoulders to breach Lelouch’s face. He pried open his eyes. Lelouch’s were still closed. He was soft under Suzaku, cupped in his palms.

This boy, Suzaku thought. Weary and made jaded by his power and lineage. The one who promised him the obliteration of Britannia at the age of ten. The one who promised him the restoration of Japan at eighteen with red buried in his eyes and blood fixed between his fingers. This boy, Suzaku thought.

This boy, he loved.

When he tipped closer and pressed their mouths together, Lelouch gave. Cold fingers slipped across Suzaku’s neck and collarbone, tracing the speckled skin along Suzaku’s jawline. Taking hold of his shirt and dragging Suzaku in by the teeth and tongue. Suzaku gasped into Lelouch’s mouth and felt Lelouch’s lips sharpen and curve against his, smiling, arms long around the back of Suzaku’s neck. They moved against each other in time with the waves and water, rising and falling with every crash against the shoreline. The heat of the sun fell across Suzaku’s back like the spread of fingers--sank over them in a lasting touch, as if in an echo of the pyre, of a desperate, desperate fire.

Lelouch mouthed Suzaku’s name over the dip of his neck, nosing his way along Suzaku’s collarbone. “Suzaku,” Lelouch repeated, soft and sweet on his sweaty skin, and Suzaku shivered at it, the black sinews to Lelouch’s eyes and his voice, spidery with want. Suzaku thumbed at the jut of cheekbone on his face and wondered just how desperate they were. Look at them: their breath inseparable, and Suzaku could still trace the end of him and the beginnings of Lelouch. 

His voice was marrow-thin and barely a whisper on his lips. “When you said you wouldn’t let me give up everything for the Greater Good, were you lying?”

Lelouch turned his cheek so that his lips pressed into the heart of Suzaku’s palm. Suzaku’s chest stuttered. He could feel Lelouch’s smile, chapped and disastrous and still so desirable. “Don’t make me laugh, Suzaku--I can hardly be your everything. We’ve lost each other and lost to each other more times than I can count. This time will be the last.” 

“This time it’ll be permanent,” Suzaku countered, and he forcibly turned Lelouch’s face so they met eye to eye. Lelouch went, utterly undisturbed as he continued to finger the loose hair at Suzaku’s nape. 

“You can’t talk me out of this,” Lelouch said, and it was not the resignation there that renewed Suzaku’s silence. Resignation did not shine. And Suzaku knew he would lose this. Lelouch turned into his palm; Lelouch's mouth a muted edge by his thumb.

Suzaku's hand whispered down Lelouch's neck and held. 

"I can try," he whispered. 

“That’s within expectations,” Lelouch said. He shivered, a hand loosely clasped over Suzaku’s. “That’s what I like about you.”

“Being predictable?”

“Being stubborn,” Lelouch said, and kissed him.

“I hate you,” Suzaku said, again, because he could never say it enough: _I hate, hate, hate, love you. I love you._ Lelouch pulled away to grind down once, twice. The sand crunched beneath their feet and thighs. Nobody came down on them but the weak lapping of waves crawling onto shore. No god or deity, no huge oppressive hand from the other side of the sea. Seagulls squawked overhead, the blue and the clouds rolling together in slow collisions.

Lelouch smiled in retaliation, long hair for bangs falling across his bright, bright eyes. “I can work with that.” 

A choked laugh tore out of Suzaku. He pulled them down onto the beach, cradling the back of Lelouch’s head as their backs and knees hit wet sand. They were well in the reach of the ocean’s whims now, water lapping slowly at their exposed arms and legs. Lelouch’s shirt rucked up in the brief fall, skin paler than sand. His gaze was pliant in the sun’s eyes, nearly burnt; their hands were red and nascent, alive. 

And Suzaku was crying. 

"My knight," Lelouch said. His palms pushed up onto Suzaku's chest from within the opening of his shirt, fingers playing imaginary keys, slipping around a nipple and ducking into the groove of Suzaku's neck and collarbone. Suzaku took his opened mouth and Lelouch rolled them over so that their teeth knocked together and their legs tangled, so that when Lelouch finally lifted his lips off of Suzaku's he hovered above him, shadowy and obscured and dripping. A remnant of a tear rolled down his chin to fall back down to the boy beneath him.

His eyes glittered, as if wet. “Nobody else can do this,” Lelouch whispered. Suzaku shut his eyes, hearing the words close in around him. Felt the pressure of a hand or finger or lip over his cheek. “Nobody else but you.”

“I know,” Suzaku said, on the crest of a sob. “Just let me cry. Let me cry about you.”

Lelouch kissed him, slow and easy and tenacious, fingers dipped just along the hem of Suzaku's pants, mouth sucking in his cries and ugly hiccups of breath. Suzaku opened his eyes just as Lelouch pressed his lips to his ear: "Leave some things to God."


End file.
